Never Again
by CrashCart9
Summary: "You kissed her husband at the reception. You couldn't bring yourself to kiss her." Beverly/Deanna with implied Troi/Riker and Picard/Crusher , set at the beginning of ST: Nemesis.


**Never Again**  
**Author:** CrashCart9 (CrashCart9[at]Yahoo[dot]com)  
**Fandom:** Star Trek: The Next Generation  
**Pairing:** Beverly Crusher/Deanna Troi, implied Picard/Crusher and Riker/Troi  
**Date written:** February 8, 2007 (mostly)  
**Set:** During ST: Nemesis, post-wedding and pre-everything going down.  
**Rating:** R**  
Notes:** Apologies in advance for the random periods. Fanfictiondotnet has apparently decided that letting authors make their own formatting decisions is for losers (as well as typing the name of the website, even without the prefacing www; it deleted it the first time I tried to save this AN without writing out the word 'dot'), and refuses to allow double linebreaks even if you try all kinds of HTML trickery, so I had to go with putting in a punctuation placeholder. Editorializing doesn't become you, website whose name you apparently won't even let me type.

**Summary:** "You kissed her husband at the reception. You couldn't bring yourself to kiss her."**  
**

* * *

The wedding was a tangible reminder of everything you don't have.

No husband. _(you know he's supposed to be yours. you wonder what went wrong.)_  
No wife.

You kissed her husband at the reception. You couldn't bring yourself to kiss her.

It was too permanent. Too final.

.

No longer can you run a hand along her back to rest on her hip when you're in your office together. _(you remember the first time that you did that. you saw the initial surprise on her face vanish into a quirky grin and the side of her body pressed against yours as she looked into your eyes and read your intentions with that impeccable skill you've always envied.)_ Never again will she smile as you do so, turning her cheek to brush yours because she knows exactly what you're doing.

There will be no more mini-vacations; no more massages together in strange locales, arms brushing together as they hang from the adjacent tables. _(you remember the pleased moans the masseuse working her muscles elicited. you practiced the techniques for weeks so that you could take over from the hologram. so that you could be the one to make her moan like that.)_ Your jobs will be no longer intertwined, and there will be no excuse for business meetings over dinner that were truly nothing more than drawn out flirtations.

You can't let your leg rest against hers in the ready room, leeching out the comfort inherent in her touch as her leg pressed back, her hand moving to rest on your thigh under the table when things were bad or if you were feeling particularly overwhelmed. _(you can't count how many conferences, how many situations you only managed to keep your cool in because of the grounding of her touch.)_

_.  
_

You waited too long. Instead of taking, keeping, being with her, _(the woman you loved. the woman who loved you.)_ you hesitated. You pulled back, refused to commit, following some blind feeling that dictated that someone, somewhere in the universe had decided that you and he _(your late husband's friend. your friend. your boss.)_ were to be together whether you liked it or not.

_(you and he converge and diverge and have been doing so for what seems your entire lives. you're getting too old for these games.)__(she was constant.)_

.

You wonder if her husband knows that she called you Imzadi too.

_(she was beneath you: sweaty and disheveled and utterly gorgeous, your lips against her breast, her thigh pressing between your legs. you remember her screaming it wordlessly into your mind as you pushed her over the edge. you were hurt, you pulled away; you thought she was talking about him. she explained that the translation was flawed, there were connotations beyond simple number. and that she meant you.)  
(you looked into her eyes. you believed. and you understood.)_

.

The past tense feels like a weight on your heart.

_(you don't know what to do. normally, when you're feeling like this, you would go to her.)_

_.  
_

You lost your chance.

She's married now. And she's leaving.

And you will never kiss her again.


End file.
